


She's not afraid, but She is.

by angelica_barnes



Category: Ed Sheeran (Musician), One Direction (Band), Taylor Swift (Musician)
Genre: Character Study, Implied/Referenced Cheating, Multi, Side Relationships - Freeform, Unhealthy Relationships, ed's the one who dies, falling in and out of love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-27
Updated: 2018-04-27
Packaged: 2019-04-28 18:57:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14455671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angelica_barnes/pseuds/angelica_barnes
Summary: taylor falls in love easily and fast and hard. but they don't always fall for her too.even worse is that when they do, they never get to stay.or at least, she never gets to keep them.





	She's not afraid, but She is.

**Author's Note:**

> based off :
> 
> She's Not Afraid - One Direction  
> Love On The Brain - Rihanna

Maybe, Taylor thinks, maybe she wasn’t made for love. Her words are too blunt, her eyes are too teary, and her smile is too gone. The blush on her cheeks says it all, and nobody wants a girl with her heart on her sleeve.

And that’s okay, she tells herself, and Liam is the same. His eyes are kind but watery, and it’s not allergies, even if he says so. But it’s not just nothing, it’s something else, something dark. She can see it twisting and writhing inside, like dark wisps of smoke trying to wrap an invisible noose around Liam’s neck. She tries to loosen it, but can do nothing, because it’s not her hands tying it up.

There’s a raven-haired boy, across the street. He sits in the window, and he watches as Liam and Taylor walk by, and he’s soft and kind and made of pretty words and inky drawings, and Taylor likes him. But Liam likes him more, she can tell by how his eyes shine.

Liam loves him more, and so Taylor lets him get away.

That doesn’t mean she does.

 

 

-

 

Taylor thinks that maybe Zayn is familiar. His eyes are deep, filled with a longing that she feels she’s gotta have satisfied by now. But, apparently not.

He’s pretty. She knows that much, but the deep insides of his mind are still a mystery to her. She reads people pretty well, but Zayn is hard. In more ways than one, with his scarred/inked skin and slick leather jacket, and he looks like the bad boy he most definitely is not.

She wants to believe him when he leaves early and comes back late, when he says he’s going to class with a kiss to her forehead. Classes can take from seven until ten, right? They can take fifteen hours; he’s telling the truth.

He does go to class, because he’s Zayn and he’s pretty and he loves pretty things, like his artwork. So he’s not lying, per se, but there’s also an alleyway of untruths.

Liam is there, Taylor’s old Liam, and Taylor’s new Zayn kisses Liam like tomorrow may not come, and Taylor doesn’t see betrayal. She sees love, raw love, and so she asks Zayn how Liam’s doing.

He answers fine and stares at his feet, and she packs her bags and goes to live with Harry for awhile.

She doesn’t mind. Really.

 

 

-

 

Louis is the sky, Taylor thinks. He rains sometimes, and then he doesn’t, and his eyes are full of stars and then they glow like sunshine, and he’s just very unpredictable. She likes it, she likes  _ him _ , because it/he makes her feel dangerous but she’s  _ safe _ , she’s so perfectly safe, isn’t she?

His hands are rough, but not mean or pressing. Just calloused, and slightly bruising, but his touches feel like lovebites instead of slaps, so she lets him tap his fingertips across her stomach. It’s flat, and it sounds hollow when he touches it, but she ate a few days ago. No matter the sound echoing in her ears.

Harry cooks her food and brings it over for Louis and her to have on dinner dates. Because she needs to eat, he says softly, and the last time they let Louis in the kitchen he almost burned it down. Burning things is Louis’ specialty.

Maybe that’s why she feels ablaze when he kisses her, or maybe that’s why she sweats through her shirt when he holds her, and maybe that’s why she finds herself unable to breathe through the smoke he huffs.

It’s suffocating, and she tells him this, and he spits out the cigarette held tightly between his lips and stamps it out. He doesn’t meet her eyes when he grits through his teeth asking what she means, and she tries to rasp that she can’t talk when she’s with him.

Of course her lips are stitched shut, but sweet Louis understands (he’s not sweet, but he’s sweeter than Zayn and lesser than Liam, so she calls him sweet). He takes her hand, presses the end of the burnt-out cigarette into her palm, and she hisses.

Then he kisses the blistering skin and lets her go.

 

 

-

 

Ed’s hands are soft, Taylor thinks. Gentle and guiding and like the watery tears leaking out of her eyes. He wipes them away and kisses each track, each stain left in clear invisibility.

His arms are warm around her, and for once she feels safe away from Harry, who doesn’t come by as often. His eyes are less bright as her smile becomes so, and she tries to give him the sun. But she can’t, because it burns like Louis did.

Ed is sweet, she thinks, almost as sweet as Liam. He tastes like candy and lost souls, so a bit like the abandoned carousel near the woods. Alleyways and parking lots and rotting treehouses, that’s where she wants someone to kiss her. Like danger, so like Louis; like pretty, so like Zayn; like sad, so like Liam.

Smiles are ghosts, Taylor tells Ed, and he nods thoughtfully and writes that down. He scribbles random things a lot, like he lives inside his head instead of with her, and she lets him daydream. She used to daydream, back when there were princes. Liam was like Sleeping Beauty’s one, she thinks, and Zayn was probably Snow White herself.

But Ed is pure poison apple and innocent rose all wrapped in one, bleeding into good and bad as if evil can be outweighed by the truth; she takes his hand and steps onto the scale.

He is sickly, green like the pine needles littering her driveway and tired like the irises of Liam’s eyes as they wished for Zayn. She plays with his ginger hair until he reaches for her hands with his own shaky ones; like an earthquake, they are, because they’re telling her that something is going to crumble, like Liam. Something is going to fall, like Zayn. Something is going to burn, like Louis, and she thinks,  _ Good. _

Ed kisses her lips and runs his fingers through her hair, and he whispers that his heart is hers. She agrees, they’re one, but she will be half a heart when he’s gone. Will she be lonely, she asks, will he leave her lonely?

He cracks a weak smile and tells her not to worry, tells her that she’ll be okay, but he doesn’t mention himself. He’s fading, she knows, and so she murmurs that she loves him, and his laugh is quiet.

A me too is rasped and his eyes close; she’s thankful for his final gift to her. He forces his eyelids shut with the last of his life so she doesn’t have to watch it drain out of him.

 

 

-

 

Harry is beautiful, Taylor thinks. Harry is home.

He says nothing when she says this, admits it in a quiet voice and leaves her heart in Ed’s grave and her soul bleeding onto the floor. Instead he nods, so much like Ed’s snapped neck that she wants to cry; so she does, just a little bit. He’s buried with a rose, and she keeps herself as the petals; she believes he’s waiting for her.

Somewhere up there with the angels, if there are any. Ed is one.

She thinks.

Harry kisses her cheeks, and her nose, and her arms and her hands and her thighs and her neck and her stomach and her hair and her legs and she lets him, breathing softly and tittering in fairy’s language, in bells. He tells her she’s perfect in whispers as she runs her fingers through his curls; she’s done it so many times before but now it feels intimate, close.

So she’s broken, he means. She’s broken.

She knows that. It’s partly his fault, isn’t it?

Slowly his things disappear. A shirt stripped off a chair. A blanket folded in the trunk. An empty glass of ice water.

Small things, little things, but then he’s gone with the wind and she cries; there’s no one to hold her this time. So she wanders outside with the tear tracks on her cheeks that no one’s there to kiss away, and the breeze tickles her scalp and the sun kisses her freckles.

She closes her eyes and breathes; there’s Liam, his sugary sweetness melting on her tongue like snowflakes. There’s Zayn, his pretty inky smell rushing through her system, blood. There’s Louis, his smoky breath mixed with glazed-over eyes that made (make) her own sting with just a few tears. There’s Ed, his gentle fingers of bruised skin against her body and his kisses. There’s Harry, unmistakably, his green eyes staring back into her own and they both have tears spilling over.

His seem to crawl back up into his sockets, maybe they’re empty. Hers keep falling; they fall for Liam and for Zayn and for Louis and for Ed and for Harry, mostly for Harry, because she is Cinderella and he is Prince Charming.

He was supposed to be.

 

 

-

 

Maybe, Taylor thinks, maybe she wasn’t made for love. She’s old, with wrinkles and age spots and gray hairs, and she lives alone in a house with the ghosts of boys she’s missed. Boys she’s given up. Boys she’s loved for all her life.

It seems that she’s never good. Not good enough for Liam to love, not good enough for Zayn to protect, not good enough for Louis to not burn, not good enough for Ed to stay. Not good enough for Harry to want.

Maybe, Taylor thinks, maybe she just isn’t good enough.

Maybe, Taylor thinks, maybe she wasn’t made for love.


End file.
